The Pussy of Penzance
by Melaszka
Summary: A very immature parody of The Hounds of Baskerville  WITH SPOILERS . No disrespect intended to any of the Sherlock team - I love this programme to the point of insanity.


After a hard morning spent harpooning pigs and making other ingenious nods to ACD canon, most detectives would have blanched at the thought of taking on another major new case in the afternoon.

But not Sherlock Holmes! He was bored without a case, and the only vaguely mysterious thing he had to investigate was a postcard which had been delivered to 221B, despite the fact that it was addressed to someone he and John had never heard of. The message simply read:

_Dear Mark, _

_Loving the show! Please make another series. (Not sure if this card will reach you, but judging by the number of fanfic references in The Hounds, I'm guessing there's at least a chance you'll read it.)_

_Give my love to Steven, Lara, Martin and Benedict,_

_Respectfully yours, _

_Melaszka x. _

"Dull!" snarled Sherlock, hurling the card to the floor in disappointment.

"What's dull?" asked John. "The message?"

"Yes, yes, that, too, but I meant the method of delivery. It's been done before. Haven't you read _Sophie's World_?"

With nothing else to look into, it promised to be a dull afternoon ahead, so Sherlock was positively delighted when a somewhat fey, somewhat distrait young man blundered up the stairs of 221B, claiming he had something which he wanted the great detective to investigate.

"Terribly sorry to bother you," he stuttered, in curiously strangulated vowels, as he fingered a paper napkin nervously, "but I really need your help, and all that, toot toot. My name is Brian Clever-Allusion, I'm frightfully well orf, don't you know, and I caught the first train up from Penzance this morning." He looked up at Sherlock pleadingly with his puppy dog blue eyes. "Mr Holmes, you have to help me!"

"Perhaps you could tell us what the problem is, Mr Clever-Allusion?" John prompted, in his warm, chummy, everyman sort of way, as he served coffee.

The stranger smiled, shyly. "Call me Brian – please. "

He gulped and stared into the distance mournfully, before continuing:

"Twenty years ago, my father disappeared in a frightfully mysterious fashion, not long after he had started asking awkward questions about the top secret military research establishment on our doorstep. You may have heard of it? It's called Basketcase?"

John nodded. Everybody had heard of Basketcase, the creepy army laboratories where scientists were rumoured to graft extra heads onto Siamese cats and crossbreed Yorkshire terriers with mackerel, but nobody knew for sure exactly what they did there.

Brian shuddered, in a peculiar manner, like he'd suddenly been taken ill.

"People said that he'd run off with another woman," he continued. "But I was with Daddy the night that he disappeared. Everybody disregarded my account, because I was only a child, but I saw what happened…." His voice tailed off to a melodramatic whisper. "He was dragged away by some kind of panther or puma!"

John looked appalled. "Like the Beast of Bodmin? That's terrible! But are you sure? Couldn't it have been some kind of trauma nightmare that seemed so real to you as a child that you've just convinced yourself that it was true?"

Brian stared at John, with eyes now as big as saucers. His face kept twitching and he was sweating like a man who'd just stepped out of a sauna.

"That's what my therapist, Ermintrude, said too. But you don't understand, old bean! It wasn't just when I was a child! I went back to the spot where Daddy disappeared last night and I saw it. I SAW it! I saw IT!"

"What did you see?" asked Sherlock, in his usual calm, collected tones.

Brian let out a terrified whimper, followed by a kind of deranged cackle. "There in the BUSHES, I saw an enormous….. PUSSY!"

When John and Sherlock had recovered from their juvenile giggling fit, Sherlock demanded: "Say that again! In the exact words you used last time!"

Brian looked confused. "In the bushes, I saw an enormous…"

But Sherlock cut him off mid-sentence. "No, on second thoughts, don't bother. It would only start John off again. You mean a big cat, yes?"

His visitor bit his lip and nodded.

"Well, why on earth didn't you say so? Nobody uses the word 'pussy' in that context anymore….apart from Mrs Slocombe."

But this only made the apparently rather fragile soul even more addled and pathetic. Fidgetting, he simply whined:

"Well, I don't know! It's just the first word that came to mind! Can't a chap use a bally word without being given the third degree?"

"I suppose so," acknowledged Sherlock. "It's a bit strange, though….Right, anyway, what can you tell me about the personnel who work at Basketcase?"

"Um…" The nervous visitor began playing with his napkin again. "Well, there's Major Dylan. He runs the facility with an iron fist and the army gives him free rein to do whatever he likes."

"Free rein?" John asked, interested.

Brian nodded. "Yes. He's even allowed to grow a beard, totally contrary to British army regulations. Then there's Dr Zebedee, a maverick geneticist, who never lets simple things like ethics get in her way. Then there's Dr Dougall, another scientist and an old friend of Daddy's, despite their conflicting views on what was going on at Basketcase. Finally, there's Corporal Florence, who shows visitors around, except they never get visitors, as they're so top secret and scary…"

"Psst! Sherlock!" John whispered to his friend. "Have you noticed a pattern to the names of everyone involved with this case? Brian, Ermintrude, Dylan, Zebedee…"

"Yes, yes," Sherlock responded, sotto voce, but in a tone of considerable ennui. "I spotted it straight away, but it's of no consequence."

"No?"

"No. They've got the same names, but they're nothing like the characters in the original story… That won't help us identify the criminal…Oh. My. God."

He suddenly broke off and stared with a mixture of incredulity and blind terror at the window facing onto Baker Street.

"No! NO!" he started yelling, while simultaneously grimacing like a constipated gargoyle. "Not ME! Not the great Sherlock Holmes! I assure you, I canNOT see my archenemy Moriarty dancing a cha-cha-cha with a gigantic black cat outside that window, as we speak. That would be illogical. That would be LOOOOOdicrous! Does not compute!"

He broke off for a few minutes to start howling like a wolf, scampering round the room on all fours, before collapsing on the hearth rug, beating his breast like an oversexed baboon and yelling, "No, no. My dear John, it's the SUGAR!" in a bloodcurdling scream.

John looked from Sherlock to Brian in quiet bafflement. "Sherlock," he asked, "er, what's going on?"

"Isn't it obvious? Brian and I have both evidently ingested a sinister drug which has caused us to start flagrantly overacting. You're the only person in the room who hasn't started chewing the scenery and hamming it up like crazy! And you don't take sugar!"

Sherlock, by now warming to his theme, was making dramatic sawing motions with his arms in the air and rolling his eyes like Laurence Olivier's Othello.

"The drug must be in the sugar, John! Have some sugar and you, too, can start putting peculiar emphasis ON random WORDS, delivering your lines at twice the number of decibels as usual and pulling faces that would win you first prize in a gurning competition! You know you want to: really, you do."

John shook his head, sadly. "It's not good, Sherlock. It's really not good. Less is more, remember? I know the bastards keep refusing to give you a BAFTA and it's so unfair, but, trust me, this is not the way! "Doom" spelt backwards, yeah? Stay strong!"

Trying to change the subject, he asked, cheerily, "Anyway! Are we going to go down to Penzance, then, and solve Brian's case?"

"No," said Sherlock. "It's not necessary."

"Really?"

"Yes, really. There wouldn't be enough for us to do down there. They'd only end up filling the gaps in the narrative with scenic views of moorland and blurry footage of lab monkeys. Much better to solve it in the Baker Street setting, with more of the homoerotic banter between us which is the show's unique selling point."

Brian had started out of his chair, horrified: "Oh, but steady on, chaps! Play the game, and all that! You have to come down to Cornwall and see my enormous pussy! You pwomised!"

Sherlock swung round and thrust his face menacingly into Brian's.

"You don't live in Cornwall, Brian! You live in a shabby bedsit in Elephant and Castle!"

"Does he?" asked an ashen-faced John. "How do you know?"

"He couldn't have come up from Penzance on the first train this morning, like he said. He wouldn't have had time – it's due in at 11.40. How would he have got to Baker Street by 12.10?"

"Half an hour's plenty of time to get from Paddington to Baker Street!" protested John.

"It would be….IF the train arrived into Paddington on time."

"Well, maybe it did," said John, confused.

"It was a First Great Western service!"

"Ah," said John. "Point taken."

"Then there's his fake accent," Sherlock continued. "Admittedly, Lestrade's Cockney may occasionally be a bit wavery, which is presumably why they've started giving him a backstory involving Dorset, and Mycroft's accent slips now and again, for example when he keeps pronouncing "nothing" as a rhyme for "frothing", but even his posh accent is more convincing than Brian's."

"Oh, come now, Mr Holmes!" protested the visitor. "This really isn't cricket! I come here for your help and you insult me! I saw that blasted pussy, I tell you! And what about the napkin I keep fingering nervously? You haven't even noticed that. Call yourself a detective!"

"Of course I noticed it, the minute you came into the room!" snarled Sherlock, contemptuously, snatching the controversial item out of Brian's fingers. "Someone's written on it in biro, 'Here's my cellphone number and the ADDress of my downtown apartment. It's on the first floor, so you won't even have to take the elevator! Drop by anytime'."

"It was Dr Dougall," stammered Brian, pointing wildly at the napkin. "He wrote that stuff on the napkin!"

"Rubbish!" countered Sherlock. "You wrote it on there yourself, didn't you, to try to frame Dr Dougall for your father's disappearance? That's also why you keep banging on about 'pussies'. You knew that Dougall was part of the Princeton University Scary Science Investigation Expertise programme in the early 80s and you hoped I'd join up the dots. But you made one fatal mistake."

"Oh, God!" murmured Brian. "Cellphones! Of course! How could I have been so stupid? They didn't have them in the early 80s."

"Quite. And, even if they had, why would a British-born scientist, who had spent only a few months in America thirty years ago, go round using American words for the rest of his natural life? It just didn't make sense."

Brian had turned so white that he was almost translucent.

"All right. I've been found out. It was me. I don't really have a pussy. I just made it all up for the attention. Now that you've rumbled me, I might as well die – I have nothing left to live for! Pip, pip, toodaloo, old beans!"

And with that, he drew a pistol and placed the end of it in his own mouth.

Sherlock, in a compassionate, yet masterful, tone, tried to coax him to drop the weapon: "Put the gun down, Brian!"

Brian's face contorted into a tortured mask of misery and self-pity.

"Don't pretend you really want me to drop the gun!" he blubbered. "I know that you don't give a damn whether I live or die!"

"That's right. I don't," agreed Sherlock. "I freely admit that I really don't care about YOU, at all. But I DO care about cultural verisimilitude. We're in the UK, where we have some of the tightest firearms control laws in the world, but everyone's packing iron like we're in an episode of _Miami_ bleeding _Vice_. What's going on? Get rid of the gun, Brian, please! That's not how we do things in Blighty."

But it was too late. At that moment, Lestrade burst into the room, toting a submachine gun. Mrs Hudson clattered up the stairs, fumbling for the Colt 45 that she carried in the pocket of her pinny. Mike Stamford abseiled in through the window, brandishing a Kalashnikov. Sherlock had to admit that, for once in his life, he'd been beaten: the battle for any kind of British cultural authenticity had been lost.


End file.
